pathos
IPA: pˈeɪθɑs
noun
- The quality or property of anything which touches the feelings or excites emotions and passions, especially that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality.
- (rhetoric) A writer or speaker's attempt to persuade an audience through appeals involving the use of strong emotions such as pity.
- (literature) An author's attempt to evoke a feeling of pity or sympathetic sorrow for a character.
- (theology, philosophy) In theology and existentialist ethics following Kierkegaard and Heidegger, a deep and abiding commitment of the heart, as in the notion of "finding your passion" as an important aspect of a fully lived, engaged life.
- Suffering; the enduring of active stress or affliction.
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Examples of "pathos" in Sentences
- There is no need for the pathos.
- The pathos spread to all of them.
- The pathos is added to by the cookbook.
- Pathos plays on the audience's emotions.
- The poem is deeply lyrical and filled with pathos.
- Morrison nails the essential pathos from the get go.
- Pathos represents an appeal to the audience's emotions.
- But no language can do justice to the pathos of her singing.
- In a bid to add pathos to the drama, Ruby's part was expanded.
- Humor, pathos, and satire sought to stir the feelings of the public.
- The song is full of such pathos and sorrow and longing for that umbrella.
- But in place of Hardy's pathos is a perverse little smile that's blessedly contagious.
- The pathos is sweet, deep and genuine; tender, simple and true, utterly unlike much of our modern tinsel.
- No other show has sought, as its central mission, to mine comedy and pathos from the experience of aging baby boomers.
- Taking full advantage, he produced an entire cliché-defying book — one that despite a built-in pathos had an overwhelmingly prankish tone.
- It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a great writer, that he did try to make that sudden sadness, that abrupt pity, which we call pathos, a thing quite obvious, infectious, public, as if it were journalism or the measles.
- Prep — a real novel, not the result of a sales-team brainstorm — derives much of its pathos from the fact that the main character is never sure whether the boy she loves so much, and has had so many sexual encounters with, might actually constitute that magical, bygone character: her “boyfriend.”
- My central contention with regard to these writers 'pessimistic conceptions of freedom and their overall anti-modern pathos is that we ought to read them less as a separate current opposing the dominant narrative of nineteenth-century liberalism and its identification with rights, institutions, and the competitive individualism they foster than as a
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